A Place of Hiding

Nobby looked deflated, his last hope gone. “You can say you’re sorry enough to do something to change things. But I suppose that’s far too much for you, Frank.”


It was actually far too little, Frank thought. It was because things had changed that they were standing where they were standing right now. St. James saw the two men duck out of the procession heading towards the grave site. He recognised the intensity of their conversation, and he made a mental note to learn their identities. For the moment, however, he followed the rest of the mourners to the grave. Deborah walked beside him. Her reticence all morning told him that she was still smarting from their breakfast conversation, one of those senseless confrontations in which only one person clearly understands the topic under discussion. He hadn’t been that person, unfortunately. He’d been talking about the wisdom of Deborah’s ordering only mushrooms and grilled tomatoes for her morning meal while she’d appeared to be reviewing the course of their entire history together. At least, that was what he finally assumed after listening to his wife accuse him of “manhandling me in every way, Simon, as if I’m completely incapable of taking a single action on my own. Well, I’m tired of that. I’m an adult, and I wish you’d start treating me like one.”

He’d blinked from her to the menu, wondering how they’d managed to get from a discussion of protein to an accusation of heartless domination. He’d foolishly said, “What are you talking about, Deborah?” And the fact that he hadn’t followed her logic had set them on the path to disaster. It was disaster only in his eyes, though. In hers it was clearly a moment in which suspected but unnamable truths were finally being revealed about their marriage. He’d hoped she might share one or two of them with him during their drive to the funeral and the burial afterwards. But she hadn’t done so, so he was relying upon the passage of a few hours to settle things down between them.

“That must be the son,” Deborah murmured to him now. They were at the back of the mourners on a slight slope of land that rose to a wall. Inside this wall a garden grew, separated from the rest of the estate. Paths meandered haphazardly, through carefully trimmed shrubs and flowerbeds, beneath trees that were bare now but thoughtfully placed to shade concrete benches and shallow ponds. Among all this, modern sculptures stood: a granite figure curled foetally; a cupreous elf—seasoned by verdigris— posing beneath the fronds of a palm; three maidens in bronze trailing seaweed behind them; a marble sea nymph rising out of a pond. Into this setting at the top of five steps, a terrace spread out. Along the far end of it, a pergola ran, trailing vines and sheltering a single bench. It was here on the terrace that the grave had been dug, perhaps so that future generations could simultaneously contemplate the garden and consider the final resting-place of the man who had created it.

St. James saw that the coffin had already been lowered and the final parting prayers had been said. A blonde woman, incongruously wearing sunglasses as if in attendance at a Hollywood burial, was now shooing forward the man at her side. She did it verbally first, and when that didn’t work, she gave him a little push towards the grave. Next to this was a mound of earth out of which poked a shovel with black streamers hanging from it. St. James agreed with Deborah: This would be the son, Adrian Brouard, the only other inhabitant of the house aside from his aunt and the Rivers siblings on the night before his father had been murdered. Brouard’s lip curled in reaction. He brushed his mother off and approached the mound of earth. In the absolute hush of the crowd round the grave, he scooped up a shovelful of soil and flipped it on top of the coffin. The thud as the earth hit the wood below it resounded like the echo of a door being slammed.

Adrian Brouard was followed in this action by a birdlike woman so diminutive that from the back she could easily have been mistaken for a pre-adolescent boy. She handed the shovel solemnly over to Adrian Brouard’s mother who likewise poured earth into the grave. When she herself would have returned the shovel to the mound next to the grave site, yet another woman came forward and grasped the handle before the sunglassed blonde could release it.

A murmur went through the onlookers at this, and St. James studied the woman more intently. He could see little of her, for she wore a black hat the approximate size of a parasol, but she had a startling figure that she was making the most of in a trim charcoal suit. She did her bit with the shovel and handed it over to a gawky adolescent girl, curve-shouldered and weak-ankled in platform shoes. This girl made her bow at the grave and tried to give the shovel next to a boy round her age, whose height, colouring, and general appearance suggested that he was her brother. But instead of performing his part in the ritual, the boy abruptly turned away and shoved through those standing closest to the grave. A second murmur went up at this.